My interest in space program is not like a general interest in every space program.
I'm particularly interested in any African space program that one or two there are, it's not that there are many.
And I guess I have this common fascination to the universe that everybody has.
And when I got these two big ideas put together that normally are not put together like Africa and space race,
I just thought it was an amazing chance to tell about Africa and about space race in a different way.
Maybe because I was a photojournalist I was kind of disappointed with the image we received of Africa.
So I wanted to go back to this original fascination that has very little to do with this hunger, war and the mean normal images we get from there.
So I just wanted to balance that in my personal work.
When I started taking the pictures I didn't know I wanted a book.
But in doing the research I just found a lot of documents that I thought I needed to insert in my storytelling
because they gave very important pieces of information that I could not achieve in telling just by the images.
And I really wanted to play with fact and fiction so I think the including documents is something that allows you to play in a different level.
So when I collected all these documents I just thought it was like the logical step to take to do a book.
I've been asked quite often how was it to shoot in Zambia.
I've never been to Zambia.
I've actually just been in Africa once for two weeks doing a previous project.
And I just tried to find locations just like a movie director would do.
Just find locations, find actors, build the costumes and so on.
I love the fact that people are confused because at the end you understand the whole story.
I guess at the end there's all the clues you need to know to understand the rest of the book.
What I did actually is to take the big points of documentary photography and photojournalism,
more photojournalism than documentary photography and just do exactly the opposite.
I'm in a way trying to force a viewer to spend more time on the images and spend more time in understanding the story
and trying to break this direct consumption of the image as a document.
The use of photography for me does not imply that it's true,
because well, I've experienced and have taken part in this machinery of the media as a photojournalist.
And from my experience I can say that whether the pictures I was taking for newspapers were not true.
We're not 100% true, so we assume that we're not telling the truth.
We can just really enjoy the story and that's not bad.
